A client in Portland emailed me her floor plan with a red circle around the southeast corner. She had read that southeast is the wealth sector, so she put a jade plant there and waited for the money to show up. The problem was simple once we overlaid the nine palaces on her actual layout. To find your flying stars sectors you have to start from your own floor plan, not a rule someone wrote for a different home. The southeast of her home was the laundry closet. The plant was thriving. The real wealth sector, by where the stars fell that year, was her entryway, and it was blocked by a coat rack and a stack of delivery boxes. None of the generic advice had told her that, because none of it had started from her real floor plan. That is the whole point of this page. Flying stars only works once you know where the nine sectors actually sit.

Find your flying stars sectors: what to gather first

Before you touch a compass or draw a single line, you need a floor plan of your own home. Not a perfect architectural drawing. A sketch on paper is enough.

Here is what I tell clients to do. Take a blank sheet and draw your home’s layout as seen from above. Mark every room, every doorway, the windows. Then mark the four cardinal directions on it: north, south, east, west. Write N at the top if that is where north actually points in your home, not because maps usually put it there. If you live in a standalone house, start with the ground floor. Draw that one first. Upper floors get their own plan later; they do not go on the same sheet.

This is the kind of sketch that works. It does not need to be pretty. It needs to be accurate about what sits where, and which way is really north.

Once you have that, grab a compass app on your phone. A pencil and a ruler help, or just a marker on a printout. That is the whole kit. You do not need a formal luopan compass for home use. The phone gets you close enough, and I will tell you the one thing in most homes that throws the reading off.

Step 1: Find true north, not up on the page

Most people make their first mistake here. They assume the top of the floor plan is north. It almost never is. The plan was drawn for builders, not for compass orientation.

Open a compass app and stand in the middle of your home. Hold the phone flat, wait for the needle to settle, and read the direction. Then take the same reading three steps away from the fridge, the microwave, and your laptop. Metal and electronics push the bearing off by ten to twenty degrees. I have watched a client’s app swing from northeast to due north just by stepping back from his smart speaker. The number you want is the one taken clear of anything that conducts.

One more distinction worth keeping straight. There is a difference between the direction your home faces, which matters when you read flying stars from the front door, and true north for laying the interior grid. For this exercise what matters is true north across the whole plan, so the grid lines up the same way everywhere.

Step 2: Find the center of your home

For a square or rectangular home this is easy. Draw both diagonals on the plan. Where they cross is your center.

Most homes are not clean rectangles, and this is where people get stuck. If you have an L shape, a U shape, or a missing corner, use the bounding rectangle method. Draw the smallest rectangle that fully contains your entire footprint, bump outs included. Find its center with the diagonals. That center is your home’s center for flying stars purposes.

Here is the part most guides skip. The missing pieces are information, not a problem to panic over. A home with no southeast corner means the wealth sector is literally absent from the floor plan. Note which palaces are missing, because when you read the stars later, a missing palace tells you something the present ones do not.

Step 3: Lay the nine palaces grid

From the center, divide the plan into a three by three grid. South goes at the top. This is the traditional map orientation, the same one you saw in the bagua layout. North sits at the bottom. Each square is one palace, and each palace links to a part of life:

This is what the overlay looks like on a real layout. The purple lines cut the plan into nine equal squares. The blue diagonals cross at the red dot, which is your center point. Every room now falls inside one of those nine boxes.

Each palace connects to an area of life:

Now drop your rooms into the grid. A bedroom that falls in the east palace sits in the Family sector. A kitchen in the south is in Reputation. You do not need exact measurements. Rough proportions are enough, because the grid is relative to your own center, not to a ruler.

Step 4: Handle an irregular layout

If your home is L shaped, the protruding part belongs to whatever palace it pokes into. A split level home uses the main living level’s footprint for the grid, and you note the other levels separately. Round or circular plans get the bounding rectangle treatment from step 2.

The mistake to avoid is obsessing over precision. Flying stars describes tendencies, not a surveyor’s map. When a room straddles two sectors, give it to the one it is mostly inside, or simply read both. A reader once sent me a home where the dining table sat exactly on a grid line. We treated it as the southeast wealth sector because that is where most of the table fell, and it was close enough to be useful.

Common mistakes that throw the whole map off

Using the front door as north. Measuring from the door instead of the center. Trusting the compass app while leaning on the stove. Forgetting that an enclosed porch or balcony counts as floor area and shifts your bounding rectangle. Any one of these rotates every sector and sends your cures to the wrong room.

Common Questions

The Complete Flying Stars Series